As a youthful, 64 years old, with a no-wrinkled skin and the haircut of the century, I would like to discuss today, adulting, also known as emergent adulthood or delayed adulthood, or, among disparaging circles, no adulthood whatsoever.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I am author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of clinical psychology.
Two facts before we proceed.
Now, distinguish facts from opinions. I'll give you a tip. Opinions are not facts. And here's another tip. A tofer. Tip. It's a tip for your identification. Facts are not opinions.
So, two facts.
Number one, the prevalence of pathological narcissism among people younger than 25 years old is dramatically up when compared to the 1980s.
It's a convoluted way of saying that many more young people are narcissists than used to be in previous generations.
Here is fact number two.
The incidence of depressive illnesses and anxiety disorders among people younger than 25 years old is shockingly a shocking multiple of the incidence of the same disorders and diseases only 40 years ago.
So if you put these two facts together, the outcome is a bit harrowing.
A sizable proportion of young people, millennials and Gen Z, a sizable proportion, are mentally ill.
These are facts. I refer you to studies by Twenge, Campbell, and many others.
Now, put these facts aside.
And today we are going to discuss yet another problem, another phenomenon.
The rising tidal wave of narcissism among the young creates entitlement and the need to garner attention.
Young people are addicted to attention.
And so they are phenomena like virtue signaling, victimhood, and other ways of obtaining attention, including hyper-sexualization, sexualizing yourself in order to secure a modicum of noticeability.
And so entitlement, attention seeking, or addiction to attention, these are the hallmarks of young people owing to, as I said, the increasing incidence and prevalence of pathological narcissism in these age groups.
But when you couple this with depression and anxiety, the emerging picture is very problematic.
When you are anxious, when you are depressed, and when you are fragile and vulnerable, when your self-esteem and self-confidence are regulated from the outside, when you consume attention in order to somehow stabilize your sense of self-worth, your moods and your emotions, which are dysregulated.
If you put all these clinical features together, this is infancy. This is infantilism. All these are characteristics of early childhood.
These people, therefore, cannot be defined, at least from point of view of psychology, cannot be defined or perceived as adults.
And so what is true and what is not in our castigation of the younger generations as lazy, indolent, self-indulgent, entitled, narcissistic, and so on so forth.
In this video, I'll try to debunk some myths by resorting to history, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines.
And on the other hand, I try to provide a true picture of the younger generations.
When I say younger generations, I'm not referring to alpha, I'm referring to Gen Z and millennials.
And as a boomer, it is my pleasure to analyze them.
You know, kids these days, the critical chastising of younger generations, that's a hobby and a pastime of older people.
As you get older, the contrast and discrepancy between your values, your beliefs, your personal history, and the values and beliefs and personal history of younger generations, this contrast and discrepancy create dissonance, cognitive dissonance, but also other types of dissonance. For example, axiological dissonance.
To resolve the dissonance, older people tend to devalue the young, to devalue younger generations.
I'm going to read to you a sentence.
Youth now, and I'm quoting, youth now love luxury. They have bad manners. They have contempt for authority.
This sounds like something written two years ago, doesn't it?
Actually, the author of this sentence is a chap by the name of Socrates, who used to live in ancient Greece, something like 2,500 years ago.
And so there's nothing new under the sun.
The old resent and reject the young. They envy them, probably. There's an element of envy, of course.
But sometimes some of the criticism is justified.
It is the role of psychologists and social scientists in general to make a difference between claims and statements and criticisms which are not justified, they're not rigorous, they're not grounded in data and facts, and claims and criticisms which are.
And so this is the topic of today's video. Should we think bad of the young? How justified is this?
Of course, young people are always embedded in a highly specific period in history, a specific culture, specific society, values, value systems, especially the economy.
As Marx said, it's the economy, stupid. The economy determines many of our behaviors.
And this is one of the main tenets and pillars of Marxism, but it happens to be true.
Economic constraints, economic processes, economic opportunities or lack of opportunities, definitely shape and mold our choices, our decisions, and our behaviors.
Additionally, we tend to be forgetful when it comes to history, or maybe just ignorant. History has many lessons to teach us. Comparative history, when we compare ourselves to other periods in history, we gain perspective. We begin to understand, as I said, that nothing is new under the sun or under the moon, for that matter.
So today, all the rage is what is called delayed adulthood or emergent adulthood. Younger generations are supposed to be resistant to growing up. They don't want to grow up. They don't want to become adults. They have no motivation, no stamina and no work ethic.
Indeed, there is no arguing that the transition to adulthood is a lot more chaotic nowadays, and that the very definition of adulthood is very fuzzy and unclear.
We don't anymore have the kind of phases or transitions in life which denote adulthood. We don't have this anymore.
People go back and forth. They transition from a child-like phase of life into an adult-like phase of life, and then they transition back to a child-like phase of life.
It's as if in postmodern society, every individual can be simultaneously a child, an adolescent, and an adult. It's as if these phases in life are like a menu in a restaurant, and every day you can choose to be something else. Today you're an adult. Tomorrow you might as well be a baby.
This simultaneity of periods in life, phases in life, transitions in life, or what Gail Sheehy called passages in life, this simultaneity is very new.
Throughout human history, at least recorded history, and probably prior to that, the transition from stage A to stage B to stage C was rigid, predetermined, mainly socially predetermined, and irreversible.
That is not the situation today.
Traditional adult roles and adult chores and the social control that comes with them are now not age dependent, not even context dependent. These are choice dependent. We choose to act as adults. We decide to adopt certain roles and certain chores, and implied in this choice and decision-making process, is our ability to reverse course, to decide to not be an adult, and to not act as one, to not fulfill or undertake certain chores and certain roles.
Moreover, each stage in human development is now taking a lot longer.
We have learned in the past 50 years that the human brain completes its development outside the womb, and it takes 25 years. Adolescents don't have a full-fledged brain, especially when it comes to executive functions. And the brain finishes its development around age 25.
Therefore, the very perception of childhood andhas been extended. We now accept that someone age 21 is still an adolescent, still in their teens.
And so as we extend the periods in life, or the stages in life, as we accept that childhood can terminate at age 12 rather than 6, that adolescence can terminate at age 25 rather than 18, the very concept of adulthood is cast in doubt.
It becomes very, very ambiguous and equivocal. And so if we cannot agree on what is adulthood and what makes an adult, how can we discuss the topic at all? A lack of terminology undermines our ability to have a cogent, coherent and cohesive discourse.
Still, I will do my best.
Adulthood can be defined in two ways, a biological way, saying you have reached a certain age, now you're an adult, you're capable of procreating, you're capable of working, you have the right musculature, the right genitalia, the right brain, and so therefore you're an adult. It's a biological definition.
Of course the other kind of definition of adult is a functional societal definition.
When you fulfill certain roles, when you act in certain ways, when you undertake certain chores, when you accept certain tasks and assignments, when you comply with certain social norms, conventions, and mores, this is when you become an adult or this is when you attain adulthood.
This is the approach in Judaism. At age 13, a male in Judaism becomes an adult by virtue of conforming socially, adhering to social expectations, obeying social norms, embarking on a path which involves decisions largely dictated by society.
And so laziness, apathy, indolence, self-indulgence, may represent on the one hand a recoil from life, a clinical phenomenon known as constriction, a fear of confronting life, a dread or anxiety provoked by the need to fit in, to function, to make a living, to take care of yourself and of others if you make a family.
So there's a lot of angst involved. This is one possibility.
And the other possibility is that these traits, the aforementioned traits, traits which have been hitherto largely considered negative, are actually a positive adaptation to a changed environment.
And we will consider this perspective, unusual perspective, a bit later on.
The idea of adolescence, the idea of adolescence, is very, very new. In the 19th century, there was no concept of adolescence or teens or anything of the sort. Even the idea of childhood was very new.
And so, adolescence is a word coined by G. Stanley Hall in the early 20th century. Stanley Hall claimed that there is a distinct period between childhood and adulthood and that this period is characterized by specific biological, cognitive, psychological changes and processes and transformations and that these changes which are innate, which are inexorable, correspond to changes in social roles.
So there is kind of tandem, there is a synchronicity of internal changes, biological, psychological, etc., and external changes, how one functions in society.
And he called this transitional period, he called it adolescence. And so adolescence was born.
But how does one become an adult?
Stanley Hall failed to define or fail to delineate clearly the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. He failed to establish hallmarks or benchmarks for when we cease to become adolescents and become adults.
And it was not only Stanley Hall's failing. Actually, no one has come up with a clear, unequivocal, unambiguous, unarguable, undebatable, totally accepted, universally accepted list of what makes a human being an adolescent or an adult.
If you go to Afghanistan and then go to Russia and then go to Israel and then go to the United States, you are likely to receive four definitions of adolescence and four definitions of adulthood.
And they're going to be totally incompatible and mutually exclusive.
In Israel, for example, one definitely becomes an adult having served in the Israeli army. In Russia one becomes an adult much earlier. In Afghanistan there is no concept of adolescence at all. In the United States, one is not required to become an adult. One can spend one's entire life being a child or an adolescent, a puer eternus.
And so we are treading on very thin ice because the language is corrupted.
We're trying to impose or superimpose Western perceptions of the lifespan on the totality of humanity, on hundreds of thousands of societies, cultures, and civilizations, which are totally incompatible and view life very differently.
Now, there are, of course, transitions in life. People do change. No one disputes this.
The very concept of change is embedded even in religion. In religion, people transform. They become different, either through ritual and ceremony or by virtue of growing up, chronologically, becoming older.
So no one is disputing the concept of passages or transitions, but is it enough to make a list to specify transitions and passages in order to determine that someone is an adult.
In other words, is adulthood the sum total of a list of transitions? Or is adulthood something completely different?
The adult stage of life, is it a culmination and reification of previous psychological, biological and social processes? Or is it somehow detached from these processes? A magical turning point when alchemically one becomes someone else.
There are people who believe this and there are people who believe the latter.
There are no answers for this.
Now, it is true that younger generations, definitely compared to the boomers generation to which I belong, younger generations, young adults in the United States and in other Western industrialized countries don't always follow the same sequence of life choices and transitions that used to define adulthood, finishing school, living home, entering the workforce, finding a life partner and becoming a parent.
These used to define adulthood.
Today, the young and not only in the West, but all the world don't follow this sequence or if they do follow this sequence not necessarily in this order.
Many young people place an emphasis on self-actualization, on having fun, on entertainment, on traveling.
And so they are much more self-centered, not to say selfish, but self-centered. They're much more inward looking.
They judge everything, including societal expectations and norms, with a question of what does it do for me? What's in it for me?
And so, finishing school? Only, if it would make me rich. Living home? Why do that? When you have two servants or one servant at home, your parent, and you don't have to pay rent. Entering the workforce? Boring. There's always Netflix. Finding a life partner. Who is crazy enough to date nowadays? Dating is positively a risky enterprise. And becoming a parent, well maybe much later in life and only because it's great fun and just another toy or device.
Now, everything I've just described is not the rantings and ravings of an old man. What I've just described is actually answers given by Generation Z to questionnaires.
When Generation Z people were asked, and I'm talking about studies which put together include 2 million people in almost 40 countries.
So when people of Generation Z were asked, what is more important? Having a good loving relationship or making a lot of money, the overwhelming vast majority, almost 80% answered, making a lot of money.
And when Generation Z were asked, why would you want to make a lot of money, their overwhelming prevalent answer was, because I want to travel a lot, and I want to have fun.
When Generation Z were asked, why not have a relationship and you know fall in love their answer was because it is detrimental to a career it would hinder my career a career and a relationship, a mutually exclusive.
When Generation Z, members of Generation Z were asked, why not have intimacy and sex, they said, because the cost of having a relationship and even the cost of having sex is too high.
And when they were drilled down and they were asked, what costs are you talking about? A sizable portion answered the cost of buying drinks for my date.
And I'm kidding you not.
So everything I've just said is based on studies and research this is not a diatribe and it's not my intention in this video to express my personal opinion but to reveal to you the landscape of scholarly studies when it comes to this amazing new generations, millennials and to much higher extent generation Z.
Young adults today make decisions which use to characterize previous generations, they take these decisions much, much later in life.
According to a study by the Congressional Research Service, 2018 study, the majority of young adult men between the ages of 16 and 24 did not have a permanent job, were not married and did not have children.
Nothing wrong with that.
But if these are the determinants of adulthood, if these are inextricably associated with being an adult, then these people are not adults.
And now we're faced with two choices.
We can redefine adulthood to reflect the values of Generation Z and the millennials.
So we redefined adulthood. And we can say, for example, adulthood is when you make enough money to have a lot of fun and to travel a lot.
Well, in this sense, a proportion of Generation Z and millennials are adults.
Because the actual fact is that the majority of them don't make enough money and they don't travel. These are just fantasies and aspirations.
But we could redefine adulthood this way. Why not?
But if we define adulthood in the old fashioned way, you know, family, career, parenthood, chores, obligations, responsibilities, and so and so forth, I'm sorry to say that Generation Z and Millennials are not adults by any stretch of this old-fashioned definition.
One indicator is marriage or the formation of permanent committed dyads, permanent committed couples.
Marriage is an institution. It's not necessarily an indicator of long-term commitment and investment, seriousness about life. You could live together as a couple without marriage and it would still qualify.
So let us look at committed relationships, one variant of which is marriage.
According to the Atlantic, the median age that men now commit to our relationship is 30. That was 2018, by the way, the figure now is 32.5.
So men wait until they are 33 years old to enter a committed relationship, regardless of its nature.
Similarly, women nowadays wait until they are 30, 3-0, before they settle down with a life partner, or a partner, a committed partner.
In other words, people under the age of 30 are very averse. They're very much against commitment, long-term relationship, intimacy, sharing, being together, etc.
They are highly individualistic, some would say malignantly individualist. They're atomized. They're solipsistic. They refuse to work with other people.
And by the way, they refuse to work with other people also in the workplace.
In the wake of the pandemic, millions of people under the age of 25 resigned because they've had to go back to the office.
When these people were asked, why did you resign? They said, because I don't want to meet my colleagues again.
People under the age of 30 regard any human interaction, sex included, to be unpleasant, uncomfortable, onerous and best avoided.
Indeed, the frequency of sexamong people younger than 35 has collapsed.
People younger than 35 are having less sex than their parents and considerably less sex than their grandparents.
And even the number of sexual partners has declined precipitously.
People under age 35 are having much fewer sexual partners.
Promiscuity is limited to a sliver of this young population and these are usually people with personality disorders or dark personalities.
Sex and intimacy are the main modes of communication among the young. This is a biological fact. This is nothing to do with value judgments, history, sociology, analysis, criticism.
Forget all this. It's a fact that sex and intimacy are biologically determined, especially among the young. It's reflected in hormonal balances.
In other words, in order to not have sex and in order to avoid and shun intimacy as a strategy, the young need to invest a lot of efforts. They need to fight this natural urge. They need to fight it actively and proactively.
Consequently, for example, the consumption of pornography, which compensates for a lack of sex, has supernova exploded among the young. The youngand the very old, by the way, are the two groups which constitute the bulk of consumers of pornography. And that is compensation for sex.
When it comes to intimacy, the young compensate, because there's a need, it's a biological need for intimacy at this age, the young compensate by creating fake intimacy, ex-acts intimacy, pseudo-intimacy, for example, arrangements like friends with benefits or artificial intelligence partners.
And so the picture is factually problematic. It's not a question of the values of a specific generation and do we always chastise and criticize the young and it's all true, but there are serious factual problems, serious real problems with the younger generations.
In a minute we will see why.
This delayed adulthood of millennials and Gen Zers is a strong indicator of immaturity, some kind of giving up on life, an apathetic attitude. Laziness and indolence are usually strong indicators of a depressive reaction.
And when you avoid life, when you constrict your life, when your life is comprised of two cats and one Netflix, more or less, and going and coming back from a job that you detest and hate, then of course you are depressed and you avoid responsibility and accountability and you become highly self-indulgent you're trying to cater to your depression and anxiety by self-soothing.
There's a variety of self-soothing behaviors which are much more common among the young than among other generations. And that includes eating disorders, drug abuse, substance abuse, etc., they're much higher among the young than among older generations.
And so, when we look at people in their teens and 20s, there is definitely a delay in adulthood. There is a discordance or dissonance between the adult experience of previous generations and the adult experience of these young generations.
Many of these young generations finish school, but other hallmarks, other determinants, other signs of adulthood, are delayed. For example, driving a car, obtaining a driver's license, drinking, alcohol, gun ownership in the United States. Other indicators of adulthood are delayed by years among the young. By years.
Now some would say it's great that these people don't drink, and it's great that they don't own guns. What's wrong with it? Nothing's wrong with it except the motivation for not drinking and the motivation for not driving and the motivation for not owning a gun is pathological. It's not the outcome of some value judgment or the outcome of some decision to make the world a better place.
It's theoutcome of avoidance, withdrawal, outcome of atomization, outcome of shunning society and societal interactions and expectations and nonconformity that is passive aggressive and subtle and covert.
These people are putting off all dimensions and aspects of growing up. That includes marriage, committed relationships, childbearing, finding a job, living home. I mean, one third of people under age 35 still live with their parents.
In a minute we'll come to the reasons for this but the fact is there so these propensities and proclivities of the young distort the institutions which allow people to socialize early.
Early in life, we undergo a psychological process known as socialization. Agents of society, like mother and father and teachers and peers and role models, agents of society introduce us to the values, norms, expectations, edicts of society. Agents of socialization allow us to learn how to behave socially and sexually. These are known as sexual scripts and behavioral scripts.
And so gradually, we are inducted into society, we're introduced into society, with a kind help and support and succor of adults around us.
But if adults don't exist or if people around us are not adults, the whole process of socialization falls apart, and society's ability to function is severely hampered.
And so when you look, for example, at modern dating, you see this in action.
Because the participants in modern dating are infantile, they haven't grown up they're not adults the very institution of dating became infantilized.
Similarly when you hold a job when you have a career if you are not an adult you are not likely to assume responsibility for your actions you are not an adult, you are not likely to assume responsibility for your actions. You are not likely to be accountable for your mistakes. And you are not likely to take pride and respect your profession.
Because that's what adults do, not children or adolescents.
So the corruption of the individual, the inability of members of Generation Z and millennials to become adults reflects on society at large, undermines it, ruins it.
It's not a question of decadence. It's a question of decomposition and disintegration.
This is the risk.
Each and every individual in the younger generations is not at risk.
They live parasitically of mother and father. They don't work or they are tempting temporary jobs. They play video games between six and eight hours a day, shockingly. They go to work and come back, doing the minimum, the absolute minimum necessary.
It's even a philosophy. It's an ideology. They're proud of it. Go to TikTok and Instagram, if you don't believe me. They're proud of doing the absolute minimum at work.
And so each individual, each member of these generations is not harmed, is not harmed in any meaningful way. There's no risk for to survival.
But the totality, what we call society or civilization or the collective is damaged. It's damaged. It's damaged and there is a survival issue, survival of the species.
If our entire species is comprised of children and adolescents, we're not going to survive.
Adults are needed in order to survive. Adulthood is a critical feature of survival. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
People live longer, longer life expectancy may have delayed childhood, the onset of adolescence, and the emergence of adulthood. Possibly that's one of the reasons.
There's no longer a ticking clock, partly because most women in the West at least don't want to have children, and partly because those who do want to have children can delay the decision until age 35 medicine allows for that.
So there are many more options available throughout the lifespan because the lifespan is longer and the impossible has now become possible.
But that's not the picture that emerges.
It's not that people delay critical decisions, or not only that they delay critical decisions.
It's just about half of them never make these decisions at all.
For example, studies by Pew Center demonstrate that 42% of adults, or so-called adults, 42% of people above age 18 choose to remain lifelong singles.
So that is not about delaying the decision. It's about deciding to not decide. Deciding to never ever become an adult.
The economy has a lot to do with it. It is a fact that it is much more difficult to purchase a home nowadays than it was, let's say, in the 1950s or even 1960s.
The prices of housing, rental, rentals and so on, has exploded. And today you need to work hundreds of years to purchase an average apartment and that makes it utterly impossible. So it's a pipe dream. To own your own property is a pipe dream nowadays.
Millennials and Generation Z cannot buy homes and they cannot buy homes because homes are too expensive, not because they are too profligate.
That's one reason.
Consequently, because they realize they can never own a place of their own, young people spend a lot of money on frivolities, on devices, on drinking, on traveling, by the way, rarely on each other, but individually.
So having given up on life, essentially, having given up on personal autonomy, on independence, on agency, self-efficacy, having resigned themselves to being lifelong dependence on their parents or on the state, having adopted a parasitic mindset, as justified by reality, these young people nowadays have redirected their income, or the distribution and allocation of their income, to entertainment, fun, self-gratification, and self-indulgence.
But we should not confuse the cart with the donkey the reason for this reallocation of economic resources the reason for the fact that young people do not invest their income productively, but just squander it away on entertainment and fun and other non-productive issues.
The reason is because there are no productive options. It's not that the young don't have enough money to buy a home because they've spent the money on avocado salad and on clothes for their cats.
That's not the reason.
They are spending money on avocado salad and lattes because they cannot buy a home.
There's no horizon. There's no future. There's no hope.
So young people end up dividing their lives equally between video games and traveling. And I'm kidding you not. This is what studies show if you put aside the time dedicated to work which is diminishing by the year by the way what's left is divided equally between video games and traveling and substance abuse and drug abuse and alcohol stimulants and so on so forth is an accompaniment to these activities.
Traveling used to be a very important part of the education and upbringing of young people. In the 19th century, a young person of good stock, of good upbringing, would travel around Europe, in Italy, in France, and get acquainted with Western civilization, art and culture. It was thought to be a very important part of education.
Today's traveling is different.
When the young travel, they do not frequent museums. They do not go, they do not hunt for landmarks.
Studies have shown that when the young travel, they dedicate most of the time to raves, music festivals and drug and alcohol consumption. This is the kind of traveling they do.
Extending adolescence seems to have become a kind of religion, or kind of philosophy of life.
Adulthood is not only delayed, it's impossible.
Because everything is too expensive and out of reach.
Income inequality is growing. Jobs, well-paying jobs are becoming more scarce by the day. And there is a globalized competition for these places.
And so people give up, growing up, people give up. They give up on growing up and they remain stuck in childhood and adolescence. An infinite adolescence.
People study and then continue to study and then continue tochildhood and adolescence. An infinite adolescence.
There's a study titled Delayed Adulthood, Delayed Desistence, Trends in the Age Distribution of Problem Behaviors. It was published by the NCBI.
And the study considered whether negative behaviors associated with adolescents, like substance abuse, crime, violent death, whether these behaviors spilled over into people who were supposed to be adults by now, people age 25, 30, 35. Whether people age 25 to 35 continue to behave as if they were adolescents.
And this delayed adulthood. The study found that the incidence of these behaviors among people aged 25 to 35 has not increased.
But what the study neglected to mention is that these behaviors also did not decrease. They did not increase, it's true, but they did not decrease as they should have.
And so some scholars trying to square the circles or justify the unjustifiable or avoid, you know, bury the collective head in the sand, some scholars determined that the increasing length of the transitional period before adult status required the development of a new life stage and they labeled it emerging adulthood or emergent adulthood.
Emerging adulthood is the extended journey to adulthood.
The problem is not that the journey is extended. The problem is not that adolescence is longer. This is not the problem.
The problem is that adulthood never arrives.
Millennials know it well. Millennials call it adulting. Adulting is pretending to be an adult when actually you're not and never will be.
So all these scholars that try to excuse the extension of adolescence into old age, all these scholars are deceiving themselves and us. There's no emerging adulthood, there's infinite adolescence.
And the members of Generation Z and millennials know it well. They are the first to admit that they are not grown up, they're not adults and never want to be.
They disparage adulthood. They think it's a bad thing to best avoid it.
Emerging adulthood was first proposed by Jeffrey Arnett, and it is supposed to span the ages 18 to 29.
Arnett said that in post-industrial societies, it has become a culturally institutionalized period of self-focus instability, identity exploration, feeling neither adolescent nor adult with a sense of anxiety but also of exciting possibility.
Arnett should have read Eric Erickson. Eric Erickson described exactly these features, exactly these behaviors, exactly these traits and exactly these experiences.
When Erickson described them, he called them adolescence. And he coined the phrase, the moratorium phase.
Adolescence experiment with identities, sexual identities, social identities, interpersonal identities. Adolescence is about experimentation. It's about the infinite possibilities of the world that the world has to offer. It's about self-centeredness, a focus on the self because of the emerging individual. It's a stage of second individuation. There's a lot of instability, identity diffusion.
Arnett did not have to come with a new phrase or term because Erickson has preceded him by decades.
But Erickson has been a lot more truthful than Arnett. Erickson called it adolescence. It is adolescence. It is adolescence. It has nothing to do with adulthood. Nothing to do with adulthood.
And calling it emerging adulthood is pandering to political correctness. Which is not a good way of doing science.
Nancy Hill and Alexis Redding wrote a book titled The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood and they wrote another piece from the Atlantic the real reason young adults seem slow to grow up.
What these authors suggested or argued is that changes in the young generations are not new, they are not unprecedented. It's not a new developmental age or stage, which I fully agree with.
It's a symptom. It's a symptom of changing psychology and increase in narcissism, for example. And it's a symptom of changing economy.
They wrote, delayed adulthood is an expected response to the economic conditionsshaping the period when young adults enter the workforce. Very true.
What they neglect to mention is the dramatic transformation and alteration in the psychology of the younger generations.
Young generations, younger generations are focused, as I said, on attentiongathering and seeking attention, on self-gratification, on entitlement, on virtue signaling. These are all narcissistic activities, traits, and features.
Couple narcissism with difficulties in life, and what you get is a reticent young person who refuses to grow up.
Narcissists refuse to grow up because reality is too much for them. They cannot countenance reality, they cannot cope with it, they cannot modify it, they cannot act in it and on it, they are not self-efficacious.
So, narcissists compensate by creating a fantasy. And the core feature of the narcissist's fantasy is never growing up, remaining a child or an adolescent forever.
What we see in the young generation is a narcissistic shared fantasy. Is narcissism writ large, generational narcissism?
Previous generations have had to cope with economic and financial difficulties. During the Great Depression, only 3% of young men and women stayed at home. 97% ventured out to find a life. Same numbers applied during the Second World War.
This is not the first generation to encounter expensive housing or exorbitantly expensive housing. This is not the first generation to encounter a difficult job landscape. This is not the first generation to come across a transitional period in society.
This is a spoiled generation. Previous generations have had it very tough and very difficult, and they manage. They manage to become adults. These generations, Generation Z especially, are spoiled and pampered, weak, too weak for their own good.
At the very first sign of difficulty, they run back to mommy and daddy. They hide behind mummy's apron and they gaze through it at their video games and Netflix, and they find comfort and soothing in their cats.
That's not a life strategy. That's a death cult. A death cult because it elevates material possessions and objects and money above the value of living a full-filled and happy and intimate and loving human life.
Delayed adulthood has become the norm in these generations, millennials and Generation Z.
It is not unprecedented though. I would like to debunk this myth.
There is a myth that what's happening nowadays to Generation Z and Millennials is the first time it's happened. It's never happened before in human history.
That's complete nonsense. It's not true.
You don't have to travel far.
In some periods in the 19th century, more than half of young people did not get married. They remained lifelong singles. That was especially true with women and these women were known as spinsters, old maids who never got married. Half of them never did.
So you don't have to go far.
Helen Reddy, for example, noted that in the late 19th and early 20th century, young people achieved the signposts and indicators of adulthood at ages which are similar to young people today.
Take for example 1900, the year 1900, that's 120 years ago. 41% of adults in the year 1900, between the ages of 18 and 29, 41% of them lived with their parents.
Similarly, in the year 2020, 47% of people between ages 18 and 29 lived with their parents. So, 1920, a similar percentage of young peoplestayed at home, never ventured out, lived with mommy and daddy.
What's happening today is not unprecedented. It has happened before, everything, all of it has happened before and it has happened before time and again and again and again.
But never before what is unprecedented is the external environment and the societal collapse.
What is unprecedented, for example, is the level of income inequality. That's unprecedented. What is unprecedented is globalization, the level of globalization and the competition for scarce jobs. What is unprecedented is the price of housing never been higher in human history. What is unprecedented is the fact that people in the 19th century who were single, people who couldn't find a partner, people who didn't create families, people who lived with mother and father because they couldn't afford to grow up and become adults, these people felt very bad about it. Very bad. Society mocked them and they criticized themselves. They were self-critical. They felt that they were failures and losers. They had a strong motivation and incentive to change their conditions, to become adults. While people today, young people today, are proud of the way they live. They brag about it. They think it's cool. In other words, delayed adulthood or not adulthood has become an ideology ideology now people are committed ideologically to not growing up because adults suck adults are bad adults are evil the world of adults should is best avoided it should be shunned and should be should be torn down should be brought down and so you see for example that, that the biggest cohort, the biggest group, the greatest group of population, who vote for autocratic dictators and wannabe dictators, like Donald Trump, are people under the age of 30. People under the age of 30 people under the age of 30 support overwhelmingly terrorist organizations criminals dictators because they want to destroy the system they believe in destruction they're in this sense they are nihilis or anarchists. Majority of people under age 30 consider democracy, human, certain types of political rights and so on so forth to be wrong and outdated because they believe that adults have created an environment which is anti-youth. What I'm trying to say is that the refusal to grow up, the refusal to become adults is an ideology. It's the young against the old. It's a civil war. The refusal to become an adult, delayed adulthood, emergent, long-term stretching of adolescence and childhood, these are passive-aggressive. This is passive-aggressive sabotage. The young are trying to sabotage the system, to undermine the establishment, to destroy the old world. And they do this by refusing to participate in reality, by withdrawing from reality. And they withdraw from reality by not growing up. When you do not become an adult, you don't play the game. And when you don't play the game, the game is done and finished and gone. The game critically depends on participation. Non-participation is a form of civil resistance, passive aggressive sabotage. And that is what the younger doing nowadays. And they choose populist leaders with authoritarian dictatorial leanings. Because they believe that these kind of leaders will have them to destroy the establishment, to ruin the existing order and to replace it with something else or new, which is not even defined. It's fuzzling. Young people nowadays are destructive, self-destructive, but also destructive. Their motto is destruction. That's why you see people in support of Al-Qaeda and Hamas and Hezbollah and ISIS and I'm not talking I'm not talking about young Muslim fundamentalists I'm talking about 20% of people under the age of 25 in the West why are they why do they support these nihilistic or Islamist terrorist organizations because they are terrorists they promise to destroy everything
destruction has become the idol of the young. They believe that existence has become intolerable and unbearable, and they must tear down everything. And of course, this kind of approach to reality creates anxiety and depression. If you believe that the world is hostile to you, if you believe that the world does not and will never afford your opportunities, if you believe in a kind of ambient atmospheric conspiracy against the young. If you believe that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you invest, you will never get anywhere, you won't even be able to afford an apartment, let alone a family.
If you believe in this, and if this happens to be reality, then of course you would be anxious. Of course you would be depressed. Of course you would become narcissistic.
Narcissism is a compensatory defense against intolerable reality. Of course you would become psychopathic. And of course you would support psychopathic leaders, psychopathic movements, psychopathic solutions.
This is what the world renowned research at Harvard in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s revealed that students throughout these decades felt anxious, lost, pressured, uncertain about the transition to adulthood.
There's nothing new about this. Different historical context, increased demographic diversity, you name it.
Students, college students, young people always felt bad, always felt anxious, always felt depressed. But it was a small negligible minority.
Now it is a very sizable minority and soon to become majority.
The rates of depression and anxiety has gone up 300 and 500% respectively among the young within one decade.
The young complain about money. The young are obsessed with money actually, perhaps because they don't have it.
When you talk to the young in studies, structured studies, structured interviews, when you read what the young have to say, when you go on social media forums and TikTok and whatever, there is an absolute obsession with money.
Money has become the central and the only value. Money trumps relationships, forget all the rest, it's all nonsense, one should focus on making money.
But not making money with hard work, not making money with diligent studies, not making money by having a work ethic, a horizon, a plan, making money quickly. Get rich quick. All kinds of scams.
This is the new religion of the young.
Finishing school only to find a job. Finding a job only to make money. Making money only to get rich. Getting rich only to travel.
The ideal is to go on pension at age 35. I'm kidding you not. Recent studies have shown this.
And so becoming financially stable and independent is no longer the goal. That's considered pedestrian, mundane, maybe even unattainable.
What is the goal is becoming filthy rich. And filthy rich now.
Young people equate adulthood with spending power. The more money you have, the more adult you are.
When we ask young people, and again we have studies comprising well over 2 million, when we ask young people which of the following do you consider a sign of adulthood, living home, finding a partner, starting a family, making a lot a boatload of money, almost all of them, extremely few exceptions, say money.
This is the only sign of adulthood, accomplished adulthood, realized adulthood.
You could live home, you could find a partner, a loving partner, lifelong partner, you could start a family, that doesn't make you an adult.
What makes you an adult is your bank account, your bottom line, and your ability to spend. To spend without thinking on what, on gadgets, on gaming, on drugs, and on traveling.
Again, this is not a diatribe, these are the outcomes of studies.
A Pew Research Center study found that lack of financial means and readiness is a key reason that young adults delay adulthood, including marriage and living home, etc.
But when you ask young adults, how much money is enough, they don't say, well, you know, I need enough money for a home and I need enough money for a family.
When you ask young adults how much money is enough, they say billions. They want billions. Anything short of billions is a personal failure and an excellent excuse not to growmaybe it's not apathy the failure to enter the workforce and there's a massive failure to enter the workforce, and there's a massive failure to enter the workforce, anywhere between 25% and 40% of young adults worldwide are not employed, not even in temporary jobs, not employed at all.
The overwhelming vast majority of them are not looking for a job either. They don't want to find a job. They regard work and working the way the aristocracy in the 17th century in Europe regarded work as something dirty.
So the failure to enter the workforce has partly to do with this but as I mentioned earlier there are also objective problems globalization created competition for each workplace which is not limited to a specific location. Today, young people in India can fulfill the jobs that would have gone to young people in America.
So globalization opened up the marketplace and created an enormous amount of competition. Manufacturing jobs used to pay well in the 1950s and 60s, and they required only a high school diploma.
Entering the workforce today is significantly more difficult. You need to have a college degree as a minimum, a college degree, and the pay is usually very minimal.
Young people consume 35% to 50% of their income to pay rent. Rent consumes half the income of young people and so you either find a make job in a McDonald's flipping burgers and you can find a middle-class kind of job but then you would spend most of your income on a roof over your head, and a tiny, tiny fraction in minority end up in jobs in the financial sector as entrepreneurs, and they make the billions.
And they are the idols and aspirations of the young. That's why the young are besotted and enamored with the likes of Elon Musk, who is far, far from genius to use a British understatement.
And so of course everyone wants to skip this and get to the point.
Younger generations have been brought up to expect instant gratification. Click of a mouse and you gratify.
And so they resent the fact that they have to work for decades in order to end up with an egg nest that can hardly suffice for an apartment. They want to be Elon Musk. Nothing short of Elon Musk.
Now, I must distinguish between young women and young men. Young women are much more mature, much better educated and much more serious about life than young men according to a 2016 study conducted by the US Census Bureau. The contractor was APM Research Lab.
Young women have little to do young men. For example, 70% of young women between the ages of 25 and 34 were employed only 49% of men.
And so young women are making more money than young men nowadays under the age of 25. Young women are making more money than young men.
For each male graduate, there are almost two female graduates. And education is of course the best predictor of future income.
Young women are on the ascendance. They're taking over. And they're taking over because young women do not reject adulthood. They do not refuse to grow up.
They embrace the tasks and the signposts and the passages of life. They get an education at some point they get married some of them have children all of them invest in themselves much more than men do.
Men have given up on life completely, especially young men. Young men have given up on life completely, especially young men.
And young men have given up not only on life, but they have given up on young women.
Any young woman would tell you how impossible it is to find a partner nowadays, a life partner as a heterosexual.
Now, there are many, many excuses to delay adulthood. Housing is expensive, jobs are scarce, but the number one excuse is education, and especially the concept of further education.
You attend college, you finish one degree in one topic, you start all over again to obtain another degree, and so it goes on and on. People are attending college or university. They anticipate getting a better job at some point.
But they spend much more time in college or university.
Recent studies have demonstrated that people, young people, graduate college or university, two to three years older than before, than for example, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Ironically, people who do not attend college and do not attend university, people with a high school diploma, they start adulthood and they start life much earlier, about three years earlier, on average. They assume and they take on the responsibility of adulthood in an earlier age.
So you have two, three populations of young people.
You have young women who are serious about life, highly educated, earners, providers, they end up being single mothers in about half the cases.
So you have young women.
You have young men and women who have never gone to college, never gone to university, their high school graduates, and they start life much earlier. They marry much earlier. They have children much earlier. They become adults much earlier, about three years earlier.
And the vast majority of generations in millennials who actually delay adulthood, who refuse to meet life head on to assume the challenges of being an adult.
And of course, the more you study in university or in college, the more money you need.
And so young adults take credit, loans, student loans, and student debt. And the amounts are enormous. The average, the median loan is $25,000, but many, many young adults have student loans, student debts which amount to $100,000, $150,000.
And so this student debt and student loan is a problem, a lifelong problem, which retards growth, stunts the young adult's ability, young, adolescent ability, or young teen ability to become an adult.
The more debt you assume, the more credits you take in order to study, the less you are able later on in life to invest in a family, in a home, because you have to pay back the loans.
Student debt is the number one reason given by young people to delay important life decisions and milestones, including moving out, getting married, having kids, buying a home, etc.
So education became a way to delay adulthood.
Rather than become an adult, people go to university or to college. They assume huge amounts of loans and debt.
And this way, they have an alibi. They have an excuse for not growing up.
I can't grow up right now. I can't be an adult right now because I have to pay back my loans. Now I can't be an adult right now because I have to pay back my loans. I can't be an adult right now because I'm studying and while I'm studying mother and father should support me.
Education became the number one way to avoid the responsibilities and chores of life.
And so when you look at universities and colleges, college students are actually young adults who refuse to be adults and use or leverage education as a way to avoid life and reality.
I mentioned housing costs and of course, housing costs play a major role.
People can't afford a home of their own and many people cannot claim to not be able to afford to move out.
But we should distinguish the two claims, that they cannot afford to purchase an apartment or a home or a residence of any kind. That part is true. Housing costs are explosively, exorbitantly expensive.
But that they cannot move out is not true. Though rental costs are very high, if you agree to share your habitation with others, rental costs is actually as low as it used to be in the 1950s.
In other words, the problem with young adults is not that rentals are very expensive, it's that they refuse to share, they refuse to share they don't want to cohabit with another young person they could share the rental costs and then the rental would be you know acceptable and tolerable not prohibitive.
But to do so, they need to share the apartment with someone. And today, young generations refuse to do that. They would rather live with father and mother than share an apartment with someone.
Sharing in general has a bad name. Sharing, cohabiting, spending your life with someone, intimacy, relationships. Any interpersonal interaction is a very bad name. Even having to go to work with your colleagues, that's a nightmare rejected by young people.
A Bankrate survey conducted by research from YouGov found that 74% of American adults view home ownership as a hallmark of success. Nearly two-thirds of American adults said that affordability was the main reason they hadn't yet purchased a home.
But these studies indicate that the problem is purchasing a home, not renting an apartment or renting a residence. Renting is crucially dependent on the willingness to share, and it is the willingness to share that is missing.
When young adults take longer to achieve the markers of adulthood, it is not that something has changed about them, it is that the world has changed, suggest some scholars like Hill and Redding.
I wholeheartedly disagree. This flies in the face of 99% of the research and the studies that we have. This is politically correct, woke nonsense.
Young adults definitely have changed, psychologically speaking, socially speaking, ideologically speaking. They're not the same. They're a break with the past.
Nothing's wrong with a break from the past if it enhances functionality, if it helps, if it is more healthy.
But the break of the younger generations from the past is pathological. The younger generations are sick, mentally sick.
And this is not some vacuum, these are studies. Delaying adulthood is perceived as I said by these generations as luxury, as fun, as the right strategy, and as an ideology.
In some ways, young adults regard getting stuck in childhood or getting stuck in adolescence as a kind of fantasy, a wonderful movie that's ongoing.
And so when you go to college or we go to university it's an extension of this. They perceive college and university as a kind of shared fantasy.
When young adults were asked for example in studies by Lisa Wade and others, when they were asked, what were they looking forward most in college and university?
A majority said sex, free sex. That's it. University and college are perceived as one huge party. It's a party, sex, drugs, the freedom to engage in sex while drunk.
Sex while drunk is the modus operandi of young people in colleges.
Now college students are distinct in this sense. They are different to the total population of young adults because as I said before, when you look at the total population of young adults, actually the role and frequency of sex have declined dramatically.
But among college students, because of the freedom afforded by the isolated environment of universities and colleges, they think it's a summer camp, it's a vacation.
They don't go there to learn, they don't go there to advance, they don't go there to gratify curiosity or even to acquire skills for a better job in the future. They go there at least in the first year to have sex and take drugs and drink.
The picture changes in the second year and third year. Sophomores are not the same as freshmen and so on so forth.
That part is true.
But the initial motivation is to have a party and generally leisure fun entertainment they are the overriding values of the young generations not education not knowledge not expertise not, not studies, not civil service, not respect, not family values, nothing, nothing except fun and entertainment.
Again, this is based on studies and on observations of actual behavior.
This is why video games are all the rage and mobile games, all the rage, and the main preoccupation and activity of people under age 25.
I don't think age is relevant here. I think what is relevant is the psychology and the behaviors.
By the way, there's another group in the population that behave in exactly the same way. These are people over age 65.
And I think people over age 65 are also renouncing adulthood and becoming infantilized they become adolescents it's a second adolescence.
So you see it's nothing to do with age. I'm 64. In a way I'm criticizing myself. I'm also becoming an adolescent under the influence.
So there are young scholars, scholars under the age of 30 or 35, they are now raising the question of why do we need adulthood? Why do we need to take adulthood so seriously?
It's a capitalist thing. Capitalism wants adults because adults consume.
So capitalism wants consumers. And that's why capitalism wants us to be adults.
You know, it's good for the real estate industry, the marriage industry, the family industry, all the concepts of adulthood. The concept of adulthood is a manipulative strategy of manipulative ploy of the elites the capitalist elites these traditions are forms of social control.
Adulthood is bad for you now the same intellectuals have taught us in the 50s and 60s and 70s that marriage is bad for you. The family is bad for you.
And now they're coming for adulthood. Adulthood is bad for you. It's a logical extension.
If family is bad for you and marriage is a form of slavery, then of course adulthood is bad for you because adults get married and create families mostly.
And so they're trying to reject adulthood out of hand and all together and some of them are trying to redefine adulthood in a way which would actually reflect adolescents so they're trying to reframe adulthood as some kind of other type of adolescence.
I mentioned a network. So the US Census Bureau notes that over half of Americans did not feel that marriage and parenthood have anything to do with adulthood.
I'm kidding you not. Half of Americans say that to be married and to be a parent, there's nothing to do with adulthood.
So what does have to do with adulthood? You guessed it right. Money. Money.
So according to the US Census Bureau half of all Americans think that the whole mark of adulthood the proof of adulthood is that you have money because you are employed and you're employed because you chose the right education so even education is an instrument of making money. Not a goal in itself.
There's nothing interesting about education. It's boring. It's repetitive. It's routine. It's road. It's it's biac. It sucks.
But unfortunately, it's the path to money.
And without money, you're not an adult. Even if you're married, even if you have children, even if you're a responsible citizen, even if you're a pillar of your community, even if you do everything right and you're a good person, essentially good person, empathic empathic supportive, loving, caring, compassionate and all these were listed, all these were considered irrelevant to adulthood. The only thing relevant to adulthood was money.
And when you cross cut, when you crossze or meta-analyze the study, you see that these half of all Americans who came up with this response were under age 35.
A lot of the criteria for adulthood depend on context, on period, on culture, on society.
Of course.
In some cultures and civilizations and societies, owning weapons and fighting is proof positive of adulthood. For example, Israel, for example, many Muslim countries.
And so it's true that we cannot have a universal definition of adulthood.
But I think there are two core components of adulthood.
Regardless of how adulthood manifests, how it is expressed, what specific behaviors and choices are associated with adulthood, there are two things that are immutable, never change.
At the core of adulthood number one responsibility. Adults are responsible for their choices, for their decisions, for their actions and for the consequences of all these. Responsibility of course, which goes hand in hand with accountability.
Number two, agency.
The belief or the conviction that you're a master of yourself and of your life.
And therefore, you should behave in ways which are conducive to a society which is essentially empathic and helpful and good to live in. Agency and responsibility.
And this has nothing to do with income, gender, period in history, location, religion, culture, civilization, racial background, ethnic background, nothing to do with any of this all. All adults are agentic, all adults are responsible.
Millennials and Generation Z refuse to assume both.
They claim to have lost agency because of objective circumstances like the rise in housing costs, feminism, you name it.
And consequently, they refuse or decline to accept responsibility.
They are irresponsible and non-agentic in principle and they're proud of it. It's part of an ideology. There's no partnership. Each and every individual in Generation Z and Millennials is out on his own.
When they do collaborate, for example in mass protests, the collaboration is more about virtue signaling and destroying the existing order. Damaging, it's destructive.
Social activism of Gen Z and millennial is ostentatious, victimhood oriented and utterly destructive. This is not a pretty sight. These generations have a lot to answer for.
The choices they are making will shape the world in the future.
But the choices they're making may mean that the world will not have a future at all.